M. Rose - The Secret Language of Stones

The two cousins embraced and kissed each other’s cheeks, and then Anna introduced us.

“Come in, come in.” Galina opened the door wider.

Following the women, I stepped over the cracked stone doorjamb into a small chamber lit with candles. The walls were covered with dozens of embroidered silk wall hangings. I recognized astrological signs I used on my talismans and the runes and symbols from my mother’s books and the silver sheets I’d taken from the bell tower. These were the keys to the portal where she practiced her dark arts, to the spirit world beyond what science has been able to explain.

My mother learned to be who she became in Paris twenty-four years ago, before I was born. In running away from her, I’d come to the same place, thinking I was escaping, but over and over again I kept running headlong into my own version of the same crisis she’d faced.

Coincidence, I thought, was merely the word we gave occurrences we couldn’t explain any other way.

“So you are Opaline,” Galina Trevoda said. “I’ve heard much about you.”

“And I you,” I responded.

While not as striking as her cousin, Galina looked more ethereal. Her parchment skin and pale lips set off black, glittering eyes that made me think of the jet I worked with. Anna told me she was in her seventies, but Galina didn’t appear any older than her fifty-five-year-old cousin.

“Welcome to my humble abode.” She smiled and gestured to the tiny cell. “So I will leave you to your work and get back to mine. I have chores upstairs. Just come find me when you are ready to leave, Anna.” She turned to me. “I hope your time here is productive.”

After Galina closed the door behind her, Anna offered me a seat at a small table in the corner of the room, already set with a tea service and more candles and covered with an embroidered silk cloth, a large pentagram in its center.

“Let’s get started and see if we can find you some relief. I know how frightening messaging is for you, especially since you think you’re under the power’s control instead of the other way around.”

“Yes, and the cries at the cemetery and down in the catacombs, they’ve intensified. I need to block them out, Anna.”

“The first thing you have to do is let go of being frightened. If the spirits feel unwelcome, they leave behind a residual psychic sludge. The universe has bestowed a marvelous gift upon you… the kind that should be treasured, but you don’t see it that way, do you?”

“No. You’ve said that before, but the messages… the voices… are so invasive. I don’t know where they come from or why they come to me at all.”

“I believe they derive from the unchallenged universe and the uncharted waters lying between our consciousness and the next realm.” Anna made broad expansive gestures as she spoke, her bracelets noisily orchestrating her words.

I was attempting to keep up, but I didn’t understand. Anna, sensing my confusion, explained.

“The lockets allow you the opportunity to give all of these souls a voice. The last gift the earth has for them-a way for them to comfort those they’ve left behind. When people pass on suddenly, especially when taken under unnatural circumstances, like wars, murders, or violent accidents, what’s been left undone and unsaid haunts them.

“We talk of ghosts haunting us, our homes, our graveyards, but it is the other way around. The souls of the departed are haunted by our grief. We need to give them solace and put them at peace so they can move on. More so for their sake than for our own. To help these departed souls be able to do that is truly a gift.”

My sudden tears surprised me. Reaching up, I brushed them away. When I replaced my hand on the table, Anna took it in her own.

“It’s hard, I know. It takes a toll. But you need to see it for the miracle it is.”

“It may be a miracle to you, but I can’t tolerate it. I need to be able to stop it.”

“I know, and I’m going to work to help you take control as much as possible.”

“Only as much as possible?”

“It’s not in my power. I’m only human. We believe there are spirits who assign abilities such as yours based on available candidates.”

“You mean some otherworldly spirit chose me to do this?”

“Yes.”

“God?”

Anna knew about my religious upbringing. Or lack of it. My father, a Christian turned atheist, believed only in the power of art. My mother, although born Jewish, eschewed all formal religion, but believed in both the power of art and of magick and claimed they were connected and that every true artist was part magician. Neither of my parents schooled me or my siblings in any faith other than faith in ourselves. I didn’t want to insult her by questioning her belief.

“It’s all right if you don’t believe,” she said as if reading my thoughts. “You’re not insulting me, Opaline. I’ve never judged you. You know that. Faith isn’t ever easy to embrace, especially in times like these. With so many millions of men being wounded and dying, of course one questions the validity and the justice of any being who would allow such atrocities to take place. Don’t worry. It’s not necessary to have faith in order to understand what’s happening to you and learn to control it better. Religion, spiritualism, magick, and alchemy are all aligned. I see it like a big kettle hanging over a fire. Everything that’s not of our plane, that’s not visible or tangible, has been thrown in and cooks. Some people take out a spoonful and taste a formal religion. Others a mystical or pagan tradition.”

“And you taste a little of each,” I said.

“I do.” She smiled. “My mother was a mystic. I learned from her until she died. Orphaned. The nuns took me in and taught me their religion while managing not to destroy mine. I became a composite of my mother’s knowledge and the church’s teachings. I stand in a unique corner of the room.”

I’d never heard her story before but understood her better now that I had.

“So, let us see what we can do for you. Even if you are a little heathen, can you keep an open mind to the idea of the spirit world? To the concept that there are powers beyond our ability to understand?”

I’d seen my mother accomplish strange feats. I’d heard objects speaking to me since childhood. Since coming to Paris and making my first locket, I’d heard voices, pitiful, searching, pained voices. I had no choice but to keep an open mind. I nodded.

“First we need to test the limitations and reach of your abilities. Then our goal will be to try to train you to lower a curtain-or shut a door-on the voices when they come unbidden and hopefully still allow you to focus on them when you need to.”

“We can do that right now?” Even though she’d couched her comments with maybes and uncertainty, I only heard her sliver of hope.

Anna laughed. “Always so impatient. We can start, but it might not happen all in one session.”

“How long?”

“I can’t tell. It might take several weeks, perhaps months. There’s no way to know how much training you need. How adept you are. Before we begin, though, we should talk first about the ramifications of this training. Opaline, I’m going to try to teach you to-”

“I opened the door, there has to be a way to shut it-” I interrupted her.

“Yes, there will be a way to shut it. The issue is that there’s a real possibility that if you shut it even once, it might stay shut.”

Picturing a large metal door like the one to the vault under the shop, I imagined shoving it closed.

“Forever? I might not be able to open it again for even one voice?”

She nodded.

If she was right, if I did close it forever and stopped hearing voices… if all the voices went away, Jean Luc would go away too. Was the risk worth the loss? I shivered. What did it mean that I could even ask myself that? What was Jean Luc really but an incorporeal dream?